Giulio Prisco is a physicist and computer scientist, and formerly a senior manager in the European Space Agency.

He is a member of the board of directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and one of the most influential voices in the transhumanist movement.

In both his 2004 essay Engineering Transcendence and his subsequent writing, he has probed the connections between transhumanism and spirituality, proposing an uncompromising and visionary “third way” philosophy that combines the aims of religion with the means of science.

Ramez Naam is the author of two SF books – Nexus and Crux – dealing with a mind linking nano-drug that he believes theoretically possible. He is also the author of the non-fiction book More Than Human – Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. He serves on the advisory board of the Institute for Accelerating Change, is a Senior Associate of the Foresight Institute, is a member of the World Future Society and is a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Roundtable. What are the dangers to humanity as we move into an ever more technologised world? Do we risk the neglect of some latent ‘psycho-spiritual’ dimension? Or could the modern machine world be as natural as everything that has gone before?

Roundtable. Humankind has long believed it is not alone – angels, elementals, entities, demons … In modernity, we trust only the seen and the measurable. But is this an error? What about intuition, imagination and inspiration, for example? From where do such insights originate, solely the brain, or from beyond?